Could Marianne have known _what_ Heaven knew, she would probably have held her husband blameless, if ill-judging; though she might have felt very little leniency towards her sister for contracting a marriage unknown to her family. But the ground was not in order for the sowing of a crop of explanation, to be reaped as a harvest of reconciliation. It was cumbered with the clover her husband was supposed to be enjoying at the Acropolis Club and elsewhere, and choked with a creeping weed of Jealousy unacknowledged. And as the trivial things of life are always the ones that play the biggest parts, so that unfortunate resolution not to disturb his wife, when Alfred Challis came home from the Club dinner, had to answer for quite ten times its fair share of the events that followed. No doubt her silence was a little vindictive--it would have been so easy to give a hint that she was awake--but the truth is it had very little to do with the matter. What had a great deal to do with it was the fact that Mr. Challis had _not_ been enjoying himself. Had it been otherwise, he would have felt apologetic; the monitor he would not admit was his conscience would have prescribed amends to Marianne for contriving to be so jolly without her. But she had no guess that her Grosvenor Square enemy was laid up with a sprained ankle, any more than he had that the new cook had been the means of bringing to light a great deal--the worst half in disjointed fragments--of a story his good if mistaken intentions had concealed. For, needless to say, the actual story was still very obscure to her; and Mrs. Eldridge, though clever enough, was a biassed assistant in its elucidation.